The Ezra Klein Show: Best Of: The War Within the Republican Party

I'm Ezra Klein, this is the Ezra Klein Show.

Let me state the question of this episode clearly.

What the hell has happened to the Republican Party?

When I began covering politics 20 years ago, the cliche was that Democrats were this barely

organized collection of squabbling interest groups, barely a party.

But Republicans were this disciplined, ideological, unified political force.

Their majority leader at the time, Tom DeLay, he had the nickname The Hammer.

If that was ever true, it's not now.

Democrats have become a pretty organized party.

Their leadership transitions are orderly, they tend to fall in line, they nominate the next

in line.

Republicans are a mess.

Watching Kevin McCarthy suffer through 14 failed votes to win the speakership, trading

away his own power, his potential job security, and really crucially, the aura of influence

and prestige that a speaker needs to be successful.

I mean, I'm no Kevin McCarthy fan, but even I felt bad for the guy.

And this was being inflicted on him by his own co-partisans.

It wasn't some plot Democrats executed against him.

The Republican tendency to obstruct, to sabotage, to throw sand in the gears, it is as powerful

when they are in charge as whether in the minority.

Because look back over the past decade or so, it's not just Kevin McCarthy.

It's Paul Ryan and John Boehner, who both quit the job McCarthy now holds because it

was so miserable.

It's the Tea Party knocking off Republican incumbent after Republican incumbent, including

members of leadership like Eric Cantor, who is majority leader and is thought to be a

future speaker.

It's Ted Cruz and the Freedom Caucus forcing government shutdowns or colleagues hated and

opposed.

It's Donald Trump humiliating almost the entire Republican Party establishment, but winning

the nomination anyway, proving that whatever the Republican Party now is, whatever the

coalition now is, he understood it much better than the politicians who'd let it.

Republicans aren't a party anymore.

They're a riot, a movement.

But they're one that is often at war with itself.

And that's not normal.

All political parties, they have internal dissent and conflict.

What is distinctive about Republicans in this era is they have lost control.

I date that to around 2010 with the rise of the Tea Party, but that's just the moment

the dynamics of the party tipped out of balance.

That's not the moment those dynamics began.

So when did they begin?

And why?

Who profits from this version of the Republican Party?

Who perpetuates it?

Nicole Hammer is a historian at Vanderbilt who studies the Republican Party and she studies

it particularly through the lens of its media.

She's the author of two great books about conservative movement, Messengers of the Right

and Her New Unpartisans, which I highly recommend, and she's a perfect person for this conversation.

As always, my email is reclineshow at nytimes.com.

Nicole Hammer, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Ezra.

So something I was thinking about during the whole Kevin McCarthy Contra attempts was this

old cliche that I used to hear when I started covering politics, which is Democrats fall

in love, Republicans fall in line.

And there were a bunch of ideas like this.

The old Will Rogers quote, I don't belong to an organized political party, I'm a Democrat.

There was this idea that Democrats were this fractious, barely held together coalition of

interest groups and Republicans were this more organized, cohesive, ideologically unified

political party.

Let me begin with asking you as a historian, was that ever true?

I think it was true for a brief moment in time and even then it was only kind of true.

In part because the Republican party doesn't become more ideologically homogenous until

you get really into the 1970s and 1980s.

In the Reagan era, you have this big landslide election time after time and you have Reagan

pronouncing what he called at the time the 11th commandment, that thou shall not attack

other Republicans.

So there was this real sense of the party and the movement have come into power.

We have our chance, let's get on the same page.

And there were definitely folks who were disappointed with Reagan, who were further

to the right than Reagan and were battling against him, but their complaints tended to

get kind of muted in that rosy glow of the Reagan era for the right.

But ever since then, it doesn't sound like a very accurate description of the Republican

party, especially since we're talking about the House.

Ever since Republicans gained power in the House of Representatives for the first time

in four decades when they come to power in 1995, there have been these fractious battles

happening within the Republican conference between the leadership and the folks who are

further to the right and see themselves as the most conservative and the most ideologically

true.

So that has been a pattern really for at least the last 25, 30 years, so it might be time

to retire some of those old sayings.

I want to zoom in on that period in 95 because I want to look at this way, this recurrent

cycle of each new Republican majority or generation basically beheading the congressional leadership

of the last one.

So when Republicans come to power in 95, when they take power in the House for the first

time in many decades, they do so mostly in the leadership of Newt Gingrich who becomes

Speaker.

But to get to that point, Newt Gingrich, among other things, leads an internal revolt against

more old line House Republicans against his own president in George H. W. Bush.

Tell me a bit about Newt Gingrich's path to power.

Newt Gingrich is such a fascinating political figure.

He's actually a PhD in history.

He was a history professor in Georgia in the late 1970s and he runs for Congress and he's

a back venture, right?

He's this guy from Georgia and he has his sights set on remaking the Republican Party.

He's just full of policy ideas and he's full of political tactics that he wants to roll

out and he has his eye on power, which is an odd thing for a back venture and a party

that has been in the minority for decades to aspire to, and yet he does.

And he sort of methodically makes his way up the ranks.

He builds the Conservative Opportunity Society and is associated with something called the

GOPAC, the GOP Political Action Committee.

So he starts to build institutions within the Republican Party.

He helps to lead ethics charges against a very powerful Democrat in the late 1980s,

Jim Wright, and manages to topple him so he gets a little bit of a political victory under

his belt against the Democrats.

But then, as you note, his path to power from then on out is through Republicans.

He works very closely with the Bush administration on working on the 1990 budget deal.

This is the budget deal that is going to raise taxes and it is going to break Bush's

Read My Lips No New Taxes pledge.

And at the very last minute, when Bush is going out to the Rose Garden to announce this

budget plan, Gingrich, who is supposed to be out there with him, be part of this photo

opportunity, veers off and goes to the cameras and attacks the plan.

And that really is the moment when you see that Gingrich is going to take on his own

party in order to find a path to the speakership.

And that's a path that he ultimately manages to create by 1995.

So you're a, I guess I've already said you're a historian, but I want to ask you a metahistorical

question here because I have read a dozen books about the great man of history theory

of Newt Gingrich and how he puts American politics on an entirely new path.

And I'm always a little uncertain if I buy it in the sense that there have now been so

many Newt Gingrich like figures that have risen to prominence in the Republican Party.

And there have been a number who tried this in the Democratic Party and basically got

nowhere that one thing I often wonder is whether or not the Republican base was simply waiting

for this figure.

And yes, Newt Gingrich was the one who appeared at that moment, but if it wasn't him, it would

have soon been someone else because this is what the party had become.

They were looking for these insurgent counter-establishment culture warlike figures.

I mean, Papu Cannon is in the same era, Rush Limbaugh is in the same era.

And so as much as Newt has his singular dimensions, that the focus on him, the idea that it could

have been that different, isn't really that true.

And you know that because repeatedly, Republicans have found other figures like this going on

and going all the way, of course, now to Donald Trump to support.

Gingrich was an innovator and he was somebody who showed a path forward for conservatives

and Republicans who came after him.

But you are absolutely right that he was leaning into a moment.

Certainly Papu Cannon's 1992 run showed that there was real discontent with the Republican

establishment.

That's actually important because if you're talking about, say, the 1960s and 1970s, there

isn't much of a conservative establishment to be upset with in the Republican Party.

It really takes those massive victories by Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, all that

institution building for think tanks in order for there to be a kind of robust conservative

Republican establishment to push back against.

And Papu Cannon pushes back against it.

Rush Limbaugh pushes back against it on his radio show.

He supports Papu Cannon in the primaries in 1992, which makes him, elevates his reputation

as a kingmaker and as somebody who is the voice of the base.

And that really is a moment when you're starting to see a distance between the conservative

base and what it wants and these Republican presidents and Republican leaders.

And so Gingrich is absolutely reading the tea leaves in many ways.

We tell the story of Newt Gingrich as radicalizing the Republican Party, moving it to the right.

But that's a kind of flat picture of Newt Gingrich because he was also looking around

and saying, it's not just Papu Cannon, it's Ross Perot, who was the third party challenger

in the 1992 and 96 elections and attracted a significant number of votes and reflected

the sense that American voters were really frustrated with the system as it was.

And Gingrich compromises a lot on conservative ideology in order to try to attract some of

those Perot voters into the Republican camp.

So he's a savvy political figure, but he's also kind of a bridge figure to the Tea Party

Caucus and to some of the House Freedom Caucus that we see today.

1992 is so extraordinary to me.

It's one of these moments where the entire egg that is a Republican Party just seems

to me to be hatching because you have Buchanan, you have Limba, you have Newt, you have Perot.

But I want to go back to something you mentioned, which is this moment where Rush Limba endorses

Papu Cannon and the George H.W. Bush White House has a, I think, a fairly extraordinary

response to that.

Can you talk through that story?

Absolutely.

So the Bush administration is looking out over the political landscape in 1992.

The threat from Papu Cannon is much larger than they thought that it would be.

Buchanan, even though he loses the New Hampshire primary to Bush by like 16 points, he got

a lot closer than any of the people in the Bush White House were comfortable with.

And as they were surveying the sources of Buchanan's popularity, they lit upon Rush

Limba, who by 1991-92 was a juggernaut in right wing media.

He was something that no one had ever seen before.

He was making millions of dollars.

He had millions of listeners.

He was about to launch a new television show.

He had bestselling books.

He was this very singular figure, and nobody knew how much influence he might have on the

conservative base.

But what the Bush administration knew was that Limba, like Buchanan, and Buchanan was doing

better than expected, and so they needed to harness some of that Limba energy.

And so in order to do that, they tap the person who is going to be Limba's television producer

and who has been a consultant to the Republican Party and to several Republican presidents,

Roger Ailes.

And they invite Roger Ailes, who would later become one of the founders of Fox News.

They invite Roger Ailes and Rush Limba to the White House to have a night at the Kennedy

Center with George and Barbara Bush to stay over at the Lincoln bedroom and really to

court him.

There's this one moment that Rush Limba will talk about for the next 30 years, where President

Bush picks up his bag and carries it in.

And in many ways, Limba latches on to that moment, not as Bush being this generous blue-blooded

wasp from New England, but as the president carried my bags.

I have the power in this situation, the president waits on me.

And that dynamic is going to define a lot of Limba's career, but also is pointing to

some things that are shifting within the conservative movement and the Republican Party, where candidates

and presidents are becoming more reliant on the conservative media systems that people

like Rush Limba are building.

It makes me think of a legislative fight I covered in 2007, I think it was, where George

W. Bush, George H.W. Bush's son, was pushing an immigration reform bill.

And this was a priority for him.

It was part of him and Carl Rove trying to build this enduring Republican majority.

It was a priority for the business wing of the Republican Party.

It was championed in the Senate by, among others, John McCain.

I think the expectation, I think it's fair to say, in politics was that it was going to pass.

It was going to pass.

And then there is this massive revolt that emerges, and it is centered in talk radio.

There are these studies that come out later about just how much of its time conservative

talk radio was spending on this bill.

And talk radio actually manages to turn enough Senate Republicans and House Republicans and

Republican elites against the bill that it dies.

This signature initiative of a Republican president is killed by the Republicans, not

primarily by the Democrats.

And I think you just begin to see this over and over again that Republican media, because

in some ways, and we can get to this, it's a truer voice of the Republican grassroots

than the Republican Party is.

It can actually beat the Republican establishment, and it does.

And every time it does it, it becomes more powerful and more able to do it again.

And I can't think of very analogous examples on the left.

A lot of your work is on Republican media, so why is it so powerful vis-a-vis the Republican

establishment?

It's a great question, because I think this is one of those codes that the left has been

trying to crack for a long time now, because they see the power of conservative media to

pull the party to the right.

And they wonder why there isn't something equivalent on the left.

The answer is complicated.

In part, it is that from pretty much the very beginning of the Cold War conservative movement,

so as early as the 1940s and 1950s, conservative activists were turning to media, whether it

was publications like National Review or radio shows like the Manion Forum or the Dan

Smoot Report, they were turning to media to affect political change.

They believed that messaging and ideology came packaged together, and if you could just

get it in front of enough people through magazines, through radio, through television, that you

would be able to build a sizable movement that could affect political change.

So there's a history of conservatives building their own media and of conservative Americans

listening to conservative media as part of their conservative identity.

And a lot of this happens because there's this very robust media criticism at the heart

of the conservative movement, that the existing media, so whether it's New York Magazine or

like CBS News or what have you, the New York Times, that existing media aren't actually

neutral and objective, that they're biased toward liberalism.

And since you're engaging and reading and listening to biased media, you should be listening

to media that's biased towards conservatism because those are the right values.

And so that is important because by the time you get to the 1980s and 1990s, by the time

you get to Rush Limbaugh, part of being a conservative in the United States really is

consuming conservative media.

And there's not an analogous movement like that or a way of thinking about politics and

media on the left, certainly not among liberal Democrats.

So that's part of the reason.

And then these institutions, these media institutions, they're not just spreading messages, but also

from pretty early on, they're getting involved in politics.

So that idea that media and politics are intertwined not just on a messaging level, but really

on an institutional and structural level is something that on the right has just, it

now has, gosh, what, like a 70-year history?

That's a lot of institution building.

That's a lot of messaging and political identity building that there just isn't yet an equivalent

of on the left.

I want to spend some real time here on the asymmetry in media structures because obviously

it's something that I've experienced to some degree.

And I want to give some credit to the right-wing view that there is, I don't exactly want to

call it a bias, but there's a liberal acculturation in a lot of the media that the people in major

newsrooms are themselves much more liberal than they are conservative.

And there's an integration in a funny way between what you might think of as a liberal

media, an MSNBC or an American Prospect, which is a small magazine I started out at, and

mainstream media, MSNBC is part of NBC.

And I know from having worked there that MSNBC is getting liberal in a way that NBC feels

reflects badly on it, that the hammer comes down and people get very upset and it becomes

like a big internal political problem.

And there's a way in which, of course, like there is a liberalism, like particularly a

cultural liberalism in the mainstream media, but there's also a restraint built around

these business models and these organizations that at least have this self-conception of

themselves as for everybody.

The New York Times desperately wants to be a paper for everybody.

NBC wants to be for everybody.

And they have business models traditionally from these local geographic monopolies, an

airwave monopolies, all the way up to these sort of mass subscription operations that

put this pressure to try to be palatable to virtually every kind of consumer.

And that's become harder and harder and harder in recent years.

But it is still a very, very present intention.

And then as you go into the further reaches of liberal or left media, people who want to

want to work at these organizations are somewhat restrained by knowing what it looks like to

be in these organizations.

And I say all that to serve up to you the counter question, which is conservative media because

it isn't intertwined, with the exception maybe the Wall Street Journal, with these mainstream

more establishment organizations that have these business models that are about appealing

to everybody, develops a very different business model that I think helps create a different

ideology instead of practices.

How would you describe the business incentives of conservative media?

I think that's right.

There's both a difference in terms of the professional practices.

Ideas like objectivity are professional practices that have continued on at places like NBC News

or At the New York Times since the 1920s and 30s and 40s that are not necessarily the same

constraints on conservative media.

But the economic question is really important because in some ways conservative media figured

out the media landscape and the shifts that were happening in the business of media much

better than some of these more mainstream institutions.

And that idea that if you have a devoted fraction of the potential viewing or listening

audience, that that devotion means people are going to keep coming back, that they are

going to trust the people who are speaking to them, so they're going to trust somebody

like Rush Limbaugh.

They're going to buy the products that are sold during the advertisements.

And so you have this different conception of what it takes to make profitable media.

And Rush Limbaugh is really an innovator in this front.

The conservative media that I was talking about earlier like National Review, like the

SMOOT report, they had not cracked the business code.

So it's not just about messaging to conservatives, but it is about offering a political message

that seems like it is going to have a real effect on how elections turn out and how people

govern while they are in office.

And that triggers a set of emotions and attachments that make people fervent fans.

And I think that's what's so important and that's the thing that Rush Limbaugh figured

out.

It's not just triggering the emotions of fear and anxiety and racial animus, although those

are all in play, but it is also about being really funny and being really entertaining

and drawing in those positive attachments as well.

And conservative media cracked that code a lot more quickly than left liberal media have.

And as a result, they have not only built these very powerful institutions politically,

Rush Limbaugh was able to go on air and say, I don't like what Mr. Newt is doing today,

and maybe you all should call Congress and let them know how you feel.

And that is a real muscle flex that Rush Limbaugh is able to do, and he's also able

to make a tremendous amount of money off of it.

So that idea of kind of micro-targeting or understanding narrow casting that you want

a small devoted audience and you can make a lot of money that way, the Wright figured

that out much more quickly in part, as you noted, because they weren't necessarily constrained

by those professional practices that a place like CBS News would have.

I think part of it is that they figured it out, and I wonder how much they were forced

into it.

And something I think about here is about what attracts people to a media organization.

When they come to you, what are they coming for?

And in a lot of conservative media and some liberal media, they're really coming for the

politics.

If you watch Fox News, if you listen to, you know, back in the day, Rush Limbaugh, maybe

today Ben Shapiro, if you watch MSNBC, you're coming for the politics.

And so if that politics is conservative, that's really, really important.

If it's a liberal, it's really important.

A lot of other kinds of media organizations, more mainstream organizations, I think something

that often gets missed and is really important is that politics is one of the things they

do, often not the main one, often definitely not the one that keeps people coming back,

right?

And local newspapers, a sports section and the classifieds were really, really important.

At the New York Times, you know, how do you feel about our cooking content or recipes?

Like, what do you think of Wordle?

It's really, it really matters.

Like, that's a big part of the business.

It's not the only thing.

The style section is important.

The book review is important.

These things that are really not in that way political.

It's a reason I think the Wall Street Journal has always been a different kind of institution

than a lot of what we think of as conservative media.

It is conservative in the sense that it is a place where you have more conservatives working.

It's owned now by Rupert Murdoch, but it's a business newspaper first.

And so it has this other set of things it is doing before it gets into the question of

its own politics.

NPR is another good example of this where, you know, culturally, I think it's for to

say it is liberal.

But is what NPR is doing?

Is it first politics?

No.

They're trying to be a news organization and have these local affiliates.

It's a bunch of other things.

So I wonder how much one of the things that has also happened here is that a lot of the

space of these organizations that are cross pressured in their missions, cross pressured

in their offerings.

And so a little held back from going all in on politics.

Those organizations had taken up a lot of that room.

And so as conservative media emerges, it is more explicitly conservative.

The market niche it is filling is not a counter news or media establishment, but an unfilled

political conservative niche.

It's such a smart observation, Ezra, because that's exactly right, the kinds of stories

that make their way into conservative media.

They're not always about electoral politics, but kind of the hump that you have to get

over to talk about a story on, say, Fox News is that it has to have a politics to it, right?

It has to fit into a broader narrative about politics, about the right about conservatism

and culture.

And that is something that is built into the missions of these outlets from the very beginning,

whether you're looking at something like national review that comes out of this frustration

with feeling that conservatives aren't well enough represented in the Republican Party

or in institutions like universities, or if it's something like Fox News that even though

it declared itself to be fair and balanced was clearly trying to tap into a more conservative

political market.

If that is your identity and your mission from the start, that shapes why people come

to you, but it also shapes the content that you put on.

And if you stray too far from that, people might go with you a little bit if they are

really attached to a particular host.

So I think you're exactly right about looking at the mission and the purpose of these outlets

in order to understand why they function so differently.

One of the current story I seem to see play out in right wing media is that media outlets

that are ultimately close to people in power, right, Sean Hannity is very friendly with

Donald Trump, they're all friendly with George W. Bush, they will at times try to push the

party or align with a party pushed towards the center.

I think a very famous period in this as after the 2012 election, when Republicans lose to

Barack Obama, there's a decision clearly being made and argued at the Republican elite level

that they need to moderate on immigration.

And so there is this big effort, the gang in the Senate emerges and they come up with

this immigration bill.

And Sean Hannity has Marco Rubio, who's now seen as a future leader of the party on to

talk about it and Sean Hannity endorses immigration reform and the thing dies under another conservative

revolt and Hannity eventually has to repudiate his own endorsement of that bill.

But I think you see it a bit in the very, I think, famous and dramatic first Republican

debate at Fox News, where it's pretty clear Fox News comes to deflate the Donald Trump

balloon and Donald Trump goes to war with them and he wins.

I agree that conservative media often wants to mediate between these different wings with

the Republican Party.

But it seems in the end that they need the audience and the audience is this more ethno

nationalist counter establishment base, which is not the elite level of the Republican

party and is often in somewhat contradiction to them, but is becoming through this whole

era just more and more the audience with conservative media and is able to use conservative

media and drag conservative media towards itself in a way that really increases its

influence over the party.

Does that feel right to you?

Not only does it feel right, but it actually helps to counter I think a misconception that

a lot of people have or a way we have of talking about right wing media, this idea that Fox

News pronounces or Rush Limbaugh pronounces and the right wing masses just follow along,

that there's a kind of brainwashing that's happening or an influence that only moves

in one direction from right wing media to the base.

What that particular instance around immigration in 2013 points to what the rise of Donald

Trump points to is that that's not the case at all.

I mean, in some ways, while it is absolutely the case that on the margins, there is influence

that media outlets have that can help shape people's points of view on particular policies,

particular directions that the party are going or particular candidates, that they need their

viewers more than their viewers need them in a lot of ways, in part because viewers are

often voters and so they have that sort of power and also because they can make their

displeasure known by changing the channel or turning the dial.

You actually see this in a pretty dramatic way after the 2020 election because Fox News

calls Arizona and then ultimately calls the election correctly for Joe Biden.

There's a backlash from the base, from the audience of Fox News in which viewers went

over to places like Newsmax and One American News, more far-right, more election denialist

spaces in order to make their displeasure known.

That doesn't cause Fox News in that instance to reverse its call, but it does alert Fox

News to the need to draw those people back in and to deliver content that will reassure

viewers that they're actually on their side.

That dynamic is really important because I think we often point to right-wing media

as being sort of anti-democratic and being this big institution that has muscled its

way to the center of American politics and has unseemly power.

Those things may still be true, but the messaging and the policy preferences often reflect the

preferences of voters and of the conservative base.

It's often the case that these outlets have to fall in line.

What's interesting now is that there is such a robust right-wing media ecosystem that people

have choices.

Back in the 1980s and the 1990s, you really had a limited number of options.

Take the case of Fox News.

In 1996, they were pretty much it when it came to right-wing cable news outlets.

That's no longer the case and it's why people were able to show their displeasure by going

to Newsmax and going to One America News because they had more options.

That's another thing that has empowered the base in relationship to right-wing media over

the past 10 or 15 years.

One theory of the Republican Party that I am interested in is that it has long had this

contradiction at its heart between its money funder corporate Koch brothers class, which

has built very, very powerful extra party institutions like Americans for Prosperity

and Heritage Action and the American Legislative Exchange Council and so on.

It wants things like the regulation.

It wants tax cuts.

It wants immigration reform.

It wants pro-business policy.

But it's also at some level fairly urban and cosmopolitan and educated.

It's not upset about the cultural direction of the country really.

It wants money or it wants the ability to make money.

Then there's this ethno-national space, which is very upset about the cultural direction

of the country.

Theta Scotchpole and Vanessa Williamson did a great study of the Tea Party years ago

that they really got at this, which is a lot of people wanted to say the Tea Party was

there to create the Ryan budget and cut entitlements, but they didn't find that at all.

The Tea Party was upset about immigration, about changing racial dynamics, about secularization,

about liberalization, about cosmopolitan.

That top of the party has become more powerful.

They've gotten way more money because of changes in campaign finance reform and inequality

and more organizational sophistication.

They've actually, or at least in, for much of the 2000s, pulled the Republican Party's

economic policy well to the right.

All the way the point that you have the Ryan budget, getting all this attention, cutting

Medicaid and cutting Medicare and cutting Social Security at different points, which

is not something that was very popular among the Republican base.

As the Republican media organization gets stronger and as it becomes more competitive,

this dynamic you just mentioned, and I think even more so as it then becomes attached to

social media, which makes it even more responsive to what Republican activists and super posters

are interested in online, that the Republican base, which has often had trouble speaking,

becomes really, really loud.

That one explanation for why the party at the middle has become weaker is that its top

wing got stronger with money and organization.

Its internationalist wing got stronger through the media.

It just doesn't have the power or the tools or really even the ideas that would effectively

mediate between these two bases.

They're always at war with each other.

They ally for a while, but then when you get to the agenda, when you get back into power,

they quickly go back to a fighting mode.

What's so fascinating about that, because I do think that that's a pretty accurate description

of the changes and the tensions that have happened, particularly in the past 20 to 25

years in the Republican Party, is that it is both true that the Republican Party has

moved further to the right, that it has shetted moderates, and certainly there are no more

liberal Republicans to be found.

It has become in some ways more ideologically cohesive, but it is still very much a coalition.

It is a coalition, again, because conservatism is such a capacious ideology that it supports

both the Wall Street Journal opinion page and sites like Breitbart.

Those are, as we've seen, more visibly in recent years in constant conflict with one

another.

The basis found that not only are conservative media outlets a pretty powerful tool that

they can wield, but also that they have real strength in primaries.

One of the places you see the tension between these two sides of the party play out have

been in primaries since 2010, as the more ethno-nationalist wing of the party has really

targeted more established figures.

Even though there have been real efforts to try to hold this coalition together to try

to get a little bit of what the party elites want or the Koch brothers wing wants, so maybe

those massive tax cuts that Donald Trump passes early on, you get something like Paul Ryan

as the Speaker of the House for the first two years of the Trump administration, which

really is kind of the symbol of the balance or the coalition between these two parts of

the movement and parts of the party.

At the end of the day, where is Paul Ryan?

Even though he was quite young and seen as the policy wonk driving the Republican Party,

he's not in Congress anymore.

He retired from his life as a member of Congress in 2019.

There is this sense that there is just this coalition that is working things out and that

in the past, I would say 15 years or so, the base has found so many more tools.

You're right about social media as one of those tools.

You're right about conservative media as one of those tools.

I would add on that the ability to do fundraising with small-dollar donations.

That has been a pretty empowering tool for parts of the right-wing base to push back

against those big Koch money donations and level the playing field a bit.

I think that last part is so important because there's a shorthand.

I was just using it.

You have money at the top and media at the bottom.

But media in online small-donor fundraising world becomes money.

I think it is so telling that if you look at Open Secrets, which tracks money in politics,

Marjorie Taylor Greene is one of the top 10 house fundraisers of the 2022 cycle.

Marjorie Taylor Greene's colleagues hate her.

The Koch-Wingler-Pulpkin Party is not there for Marjorie Taylor Greene and her Jewish

space lasers.

But she is just a constant figure in right-wing social media and media.

She has no super powerful committee assignments, nothing that would make her a fundraising

juggernaut in 1955.

But she actually is a fundraising juggernaut now, which in addition to meaning she has

attention and helps define the Republican Party publicly and cause problems often for

it, she does have power because she has money.

She doesn't rely on the party infrastructure in order to fundraise, in order to get her

message out.

That really does weaken the party as an institution.

It doesn't have any real way to discipline her.

Back in the 1990s, when Newt Gingrich was the Speaker of the House, there had been that

long government shutdown.

At the time, it was the longest in U.S. history.

It spanned from the end of 1995 to early 1996, and Gingrich realizing he had lost public

opinion that there was nothing more to be gained from having the government shutdown

decides that he's going to make a deal to reopen the government.

There is a group of Republicans to the right of Gingrich.

They call themselves the true believers, and they don't want to reopen the government.

They like it just fine that the government is shut down, and they think that the government

shutdown should continue.

And the holdouts who don't move to help open the government back up, Gingrich had tools

to try to discipline the people who were revolting against him.

Kevin McCarthy now can say, I'm not going to give you committee assignments, although

he's taken a very different approach to dealing with this.

He traded away a bunch of them.

He couldn't say that to become Speaker.

It's kind of amazing how weak of a position that he's in.

But he also just not only does he not have the tools to discipline folks, but he actually

has to continuously give away the other power that he has in order just to become Speaker.

So it's a remarkable change and a fairly short amount of time on the political scale.

Let me ask you then about what comes next, because I think there's a tendency when we

try to tell the story of the modern Republican Party to yada, yada, yada this part, right?

There's new Gingrich, and then he falls, and then it's John Boehner, and Paul Ryan, and

Kevin McCarthy, and Donald Trump.

But there's Dick Armie, who's majority leader, and then there's the era of Tom Delay in particular.

And Denny has to be a speaker, but is a less powerful figure than Delay, I think it's fair

to say.

And I think this is an era, this is an era in which I start covering politics professionally.

And I think this is part of why there was this belief that Republicans were much more

disciplined.

Tom Delay's nickname is the hammer.

There is this view that he can hold Republicans together on things Democrats simply can't

hold together on.

There are these famous instances of unbelievable legislative arm twisting, like when they're

trying to pass Medicare Part D and they hold the floor vote open forever, they end up with

ethics complaints because of how hard they squeeze people, which is seen at the time,

I think as an example of Delay's power and ruthlessness, and Democrats would never do

this.

And I think you can sort of in retrospect look at it differently and look at it as an example

of how hard they had to fight to pass this bill that maybe had actually a lot of dissension

around it.

But how do you understand the Delay period and this period in which Republicans are

seen as a more ruthless congressional force?

That period is really important as a transitional period.

You come out of the Gingrich era, which was, to call it multuous, to put it very gently,

like it had been an era of tumult.

And there were real fractures in the Republican conference.

But there were also then new kind of rules put into place to help with cohesion.

The Hastert rule comes out of this era, this idea that we're not going to put anything

on the floor that doesn't have a majority of Republican support behind it.

We're working within our conference instead of compromising and working with Democrats.

So that kind of helps in a way.

And there are still ways to discipline members of the party.

The conservative media strength is still growing in that era.

It's still an era of transition.

Fox News had been on since 1996, but it was still kind of finding its way forward, finding

its way to having a more substantial base for people to be able to access Fox News.

It was still an early project in the early 2000s.

You start to see at the beginning of the 2000s the proliferation of talk radio voices.

That's when Sean Hannity gets his show, when Glenn Beck gets his show.

So there's a moment of ferment.

And the landscape is changing very quickly when it comes to media.

And I think we can't discount the cohering power of the September 11 attacks on the war

on terror.

That there also was this outside force that at least for a few years was holding the party

together in more unity.

And that's not to discount Delay's power as a leader and his ability to sort of muscle

people into doing the things that he wanted them to do.

But it is the context in which this is happening, particularly in the first four or five years

of the 21st century, that there are these larger cultural and political forces that

are helping people to fall in line in ways that they might not have in the 1990s.

And they certainly didn't after, say, 2007 or 2008, as George Bush is becoming more

unpopular and that there's a lot of fracturing happening on the right.

I'm really glad you brought that up because I think there's another narrative here that

is potentially very important that doesn't get looked at that much.

So there's a view that you can see in books like Gary Grissel's The Rise and Fall of

the Neo-Liberal Order, which I think gives us real attention and I really recommend that

book to people, that communism and the Soviet Union had a very important co-hearing force

on the Republican Party in the entire New Deal and into sort of the neo-liberal era.

And it's in the interim between the Soviet Union and 9-11 that you get this first real

glimmer or exercising of, I think, what looks to me now like the modern Republican Party,

right, the new Gingrich Republican Party that really sees government as its true primary

enemy and to the point that it will shut it down.

This part of Grissel's point that when it has to worry about communism, Republicans

are actually held in place by being anti-government, but they also have a positive agenda for the

government.

It's around defense, they are fighting this external enemy, so you can't be completely

nihilistic about government.

The Soviet Union falls and you kind of can be.

Your enemies are liberals, your enemies are the government, your enemies are other establishment,

Republicans, rhinos.

And then 9-11 happens and that party disappears for a while again because you, again, have

this more positive agenda.

There's something the Republican Party is trying to accomplish through government.

It's at war with the Al Qaeda, to some degree, the way they put it, the Islamic world.

But then that threat fades by the mid-2000s or 2010s and the trends of the Gingrich era

take hold again.

And you, again, get this, the enemy is liberals, the enemy is the government, the enemy is

other Republicans.

How do you think about that?

It's something I've thought about a lot lately as I was trying to parse through the differences

between a figure like Ronald Reagan and a figure like Newt Gingrich because in many ways they

share a lot in common in shaping a conservative era in American politics and American government.

But Reagan is also constrained by the Cold War.

He is a Cold War president and it's not just that he has to find those positive roles for

government in places like military and things like that, but he uses a language of democracy

and freedom that is very much shaped by defining the U.S. against the Soviet Union and has

real policy implications for Ronald Reagan.

He is pro-more open immigration because he believes that the free movement of peoples

is part of the democratic system and what makes it better.

He is for free and open trade because he believes that the free movement of goods is part of

democracy and part of what makes an open society.

And it is telling that in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution

of the Soviet Union, you see a figure like Pat Buchanan emerge who does not feel that

he needs to have those same peons to democracy that Ronald Reagan brought forward, who in

fact is pretty skeptical of democracy as a system of government in a way that he couldn't

necessarily have embraced so vocally during the Cold War.

It is no wonder that in the 1990s you see the rise of a nativist anti-immigrant movement

that is very contra the kinds of policies that Reagan was promoting in immigration reform.

And so there is something about the kind of disciplining or constraining effect of these

big geopolitical battles.

And I think that that was important for somebody in shaping somebody like George W. Bush who

had kind of a more constrained view of the role of the U.S. in the world when he was

running for president in 2000 that looks very different after 9-11 when he has a more interventionist

approach to foreign policy.

And so I do think that those bigger geopolitical dynamics are important.

What I wouldn't want people to take away from that though is that there is something particularly

rosy or affirmative about having those kinds of dynamics because of course there are enormous

costs to those dynamics as well.

Whether it's red-baiting and the red scare or whether it is investigations and surveillance

of Muslim Americans, there's a real cost to that cohesion because it involves having

someone who is the enemy and that often involves the idea that there is an enemy at home as

well.

I agree with all that.

But I wonder if this need for an enemy ever goes away because I think one of the implicit

arguments here is that it doesn't.

It just turns inward when Republicans don't have a coherent enemy outward.

I wonder how much you buy this argument that is very common among political scientists.

You see it for instance in this book, Asymmetric Politics by Matt Grossman and David Hopkins.

The essential difference between the parties is that Democrats are a policy demanding coalition.

Democrats have things they want the government to do.

All these different coalitions or parts of the Democratic coalition, they're here to get

something from the government.

Republicans often don't.

They're a more ideological coalition, they're more about values, they're more about a way

they want the country to be.

This is why I found Gersel's argument interesting because he's saying that in times of this

kind of foreign threat, Republicans actually develop a more coherent agenda of what they

need from the government and then a lot of other domestic policies begin to make its

way under that agenda.

You go back to the highways being built for national defense or the way that George W.

Bush was able to get a lot of domestic work done under the post-911 unity and urgency.

But without that, Republicans have a self-negating quality to them.

They're this anti-government party, increasingly an anti-establishment party.

So when they run the government and they are the establishment, those tendencies can't

but turn on themselves.

And even worse, because the way the American government is constructed and you need a lot

of bipartisan cooperation, if your enemy becomes the Democratic party, I had Michael

Brenner Doherty or a conservative, I should say, writer on a few months ago when I asked

him, what is a Republican party?

He said, well, it's not the Democratic party.

If your enemy is a Democratic party, but you often need to work with the Democratic party

to keep the government running, like for death ceilings or to get bills passed, and yet your

whole politics as a Democratic party is the central threat to American life, at some point

that just becomes irresolvable.

There's no way to act in a way that brings all that together.

Which is the crossroads that we are at at this moment, right?

This moment of both stasis and real danger that's growing out of that stasis and that

kind of lockedness.

I do think that there is something to this idea that in the face of a large geopolitical

threat, that that creates much more space for, in particular, a president to act and

to pressure members of the party that otherwise would not necessarily cohere as quickly.

This is not surprising that in states of emergency, there's just more room for presidents.

Part of the reason why we get so much innovation under Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal,

it's why we get so much innovation and institution building during the Cold War.

I do think that that is right.

I would just want to emphasize a continuity, which is it's not as though the Republican

party pokes up its head in 1991, looks around and says, oh, no, we have no more enemies.

We must go after the Democrats.

That anti-liberalism and anti-democratic party and that real and pretty fervent dislike

disdain for attacks on Democrats and liberals on the left.

That is there throughout.

I think it's just becomes, it becomes more visible and it becomes much more the driver

of a much broader body of politics because the constraints of the need to address these

larger international threats has been eased somewhat.

What's so remarkable about the Bush era is how quickly that all falls apart.

You have an event like 9-11 and you have all of this sort of bipartisan support for something

like the war on terror, and yet by 2006, George W. Bush is ineffectual as a president and

facing just repeated revolts from the base, and it could be on things like his nomination

of Harriet Meyers to the Supreme Court.

It could be the immigration example that you mentioned earlier that part of the dynamic

might be that when Americans are particularly concerned about these larger outside threats,

that they rally around government and they rally around presidents in particular even

more and that popularity is part of what gives those presidents and those politicians more

room to maneuver as opposed to something else, right?

That it's that that popularity and public support is one of the big components and maybe

the political structure through which or political realities through which their power drives.

I want to hold on the Bush era for a minute.

I think there's a narrative among liberals that when you think about the way the Republican

Party began dissolving organizationally, not in terms of its power or its base, but its

ability to control itself in roughly the 2010s, I think with the rise of the Tea Party, that

feels like a disruptive moment, a moment where transit had been there for a long time tipped

into like the dominant equilibrium.

I think liberals tend to date this around Barack Obama.

The election of the first black president drives a part of the Republican ethno-nationalist

base a little bit crazy.

I wrote a piece and I think this piece is largely true called White Threat in a Browning

America.

One thing I noticed though when I talked to Republicans about this is they will tell that

story more about the Bush era itself, that rather than it being Barack Obama's election

and maybe they don't want to confront some of the questions of why Barack Obama's election

seemed to set this off, but that they understand the Bush era as a kind of trauma for the Republican

base.

Matt Contanetti, who is at the weekly standard and launched the Free Beacon and recently

wrote this history of the right called the Right, made this point to me that you really

have to understand the Republican Party as there being a pre-financial crisis Republican

Party and a post-financial crisis Republican Party, that the financial crisis did so much

to discredit the Republican establishment to the base.

The tarp votes were occasion such fury from Republicans.

I think you could also throw into that the Iraq war and that hangover that there's a

view and you see this a little bit in Donald Trump running so much against Jeb Bush and

the Bush family.

There's a view that Bush failed so completely that the tenuous hold the establishment had

on the grassroots, the trust it had from them to the extent it had any, was lost in

a way that it has never been and may never be able to be regained.

Do you buy that?

I do buy that.

I mean, I think that it is the case that the election of Barack Obama had a metastasizing

effect on this discontent and this anti-establishment movement and the kind of, in many ways, the

radicalization of the Republican base.

I think there's a lot of political science that underscores that belief.

At the same time, the crack-up in the party or at least the strengthening of anti-establishment

forces in the party were there earlier.

You didn't always see it at the national level.

Sometimes it was kind of sub-Rosa, so when McCain and a few other Arizona members of

Congress were working in, say, 2003 or so on immigration reform, they would go home

and they would be met by incredibly hostile constituents who did not want those reforms.

That really backed them off of doing immigration reform until that second term of the Bush

administration.

Again, the revolts that were happening against Bush, they weren't just about the housing

crisis, although, of course, TARP and those votes have a huge effect on the disaffection

towards President Bush, but it was already there, the loss of the 2006 midterms, the

corruption and all the scandals that the party was dealing with in 2005, 2006, the sense

that Bush was just helping out his buddies and he was appointing kind of these people

in positions that weren't out there to defend conservatism, but were there because they

were golf buddies or they were friends, and so it was more of this kind of, you're not

taking care of the movement, you're taking care of yourself, and that's not what we want.

That revolt was, I think, well underway in advance of the 2008 election.

What the 2008 election does is it, in many ways, it displays not just with the election

of Barack Obama, but the splits between John McCain and his team who were running the presidential

campaign for the Republicans and Sarah Palin.

That is one of those points where the tensions between somebody who was seen as an outsider

and an up and comer and somebody who was willing to stand up to the establishment actually

face off with the establishment as she detailed her fights with the campaign team within the

McCain ticket.

So, I think that there's a lot you can see in advance of 2008 that suggests something

much bigger was shifting and in fact suggests that the September 11 attacks and the kind

of political cohesion that followed for the next few years disguised a lot of the ongoing

changes and unhappinesses that were already in place.

I think that moment of McCain-Palin is so interesting and it brings up this issue which

I think is really hidden by the singular way we talk about the Republican Party, the Republican

base or Republican grassroots as if it's unchanging over time.

It brings up this issue of how the composition of the Republican Party changes in this era.

So, you have had over the past 20, 30 years a real change in educational polarization in

particular that Democratic Party is winning over in an accelerating way since Donald Trump,

college educated whites who used to be an important backbone of the Republican Party.

Democrats are becoming much stronger in the suburbs, weaker and weaker and weaker in

rural areas and if you think about the Republican Party and frankly the Democratic Party is

always having pro-establishment and anti-establishment wings.

One thing that seems to me to have happened is that the voters or Republican Party lost

where the voters inclined towards the establishment and they've gone into the Democratic Party

and I think made the Democratic Party a more pro-establishment party than it used to be

closer in some ways to big business, etc and the Republican Party is imported a lot of very,

very anti-establishment voters, voters who in many cases are the kind of Richard Hofstadter

paranoid style in American politics voters and so just the relative strength of the Republican

electorate, how strong the people who believe in institutions are versus how strong the people

who are really in politics because they hate institutions and feel they're corrupt and feel

they should be mistrusted and burnt down and that is their politics. It's not a kind of nihilism,

it's a belief about the world that that's really easy to miss but I think maybe the core of this

story actually. Right and that there is as part of that anti-institution, anti-establishment ethos

there really is an idea that you cannot brook any sort of compromise and that's any sort of

compromise with Democrats of course but really any sort of compromise even with Republican leaders

and the Republican establishment and you don't necessarily see that same dynamic occurring

on within the Democratic Party because the Democratic Party is having these same fights

at the same time, right? Barack Obama is the less establishment candidate than Hillary Clinton in

2008, the fights between Bernie Sanders supporters and Clinton supporters in 2016,

right? The same kind of dynamics are playing out but there is a kind of reconciliation that happens

in part because I think that in this refers back to something you talked about earlier,

there are bigger policy goals that are at play and so you have the fights and then you fall back

together in order to move forward toward those goals incrementally and so in many ways I guess

kind of what you're seeing is a reverse of the line that you open this conversation with which is

Republicans fall in love and Democrats fall in line and for the less establishment forces in

the Democratic Party they've been more willing to work with leadership I think than you have seen

on the Republican side and part of that is as you're pointing out that there really are just

two very different groups and in fact you saw these two very different groups in the 20 or so

anti-McCarthy votes in the recent leadership fight that there were actually two groups involved

in that fight. One group was people like Lauren Boebert and Matt Gaetz who just want nothing to

do with Kevin McCarthy and whose political power and influence and identity derives from

this idea that they will never work with the establishment even when they do and then you

had a group that was led by people like Chip Roy who have certain policies and certain processes

that they want put in place so that they can help to affect more conservative governance

while Republicans are in power and those are the people who were in constant negotiation with the

McCarthy team and who ultimately were the ones who flipped their votes and voted for McCarthy as

Speaker so you could group those 20 together and just say oh that's just the more extreme part of

the Republican Party right now but there are actually two very different ideas about governance

and about the establishment and about compromise that were playing out even within that small group

of dissenters. I've been thinking about this and how much I buy it because well let me try another

way of interpreting the two groups and I'm not confident here. There's no doubt that Chip Roy

is a much more substantive anti-institutionalist than Matt Gaetz and Matt Gaetz is slavish towards

Donald Trump and so on in a different way. Chip Roy had ideas and has ideas about how you can run

the house in a way that will give Chip Roy and people like him more power to stop things from

happening, more power to blow up processes, more power to throw sand in the gears of the machine

and he talks about it like that and Matt Gaetz is more performative to the extent he is an anti-

institutionalist. It is about being one in public not in private I think he's talked about wanting

to be the the sort of conservative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez but Ocasio-Cortez wants government

to do things that is why she in the end tends to work with the Republican Party and vote on

bills and and try to alter bills and Matt Gaetz doesn't and so I don't want to say there's no

difference between a Gaetz and a Roy but I think what unites them which is really important

is that they don't want the government to do much they don't they're not there to achieve something

they're there much more to either express displeasure or actually be part of an action

on stopping particularly Democrats but but often I think for them Republicans

from achieving things they were on board with enough in the Trump era that it's like the

Republican Party is a very different beast in opposition than it is in the majority and so you

can get into a lot of Talmudic questions about how deep these views run but but trusting that

sincerity can change as your interests change I do think there's something there that is still this

desire to make the place not work as opposed to make it work and those aren't really two sides of

the same coin they're they're very very very different that's a really excellent corrective

because what are the things that Chip Roy was fighting for he was fighting for more power to

stop something like the passage of the omnibus bill that kept the government open and running

he was fighting for more power to be able to wreck the debt ceiling negotiations so yes like he's

he's kind of savvier he understands better that you need to change the tools of the institution

and the processes of the institution in order to do those things whereas Macky it's just kind of

dancing around trying to to blow it up rhetorically so I do think that that difference is less

important than what unites them which is the problem of having anti-government forces who

are running the government is that ultimately you get what we have seen increasingly and

repeatedly over the past 30 years or so which are government shutdowns and crises over debt

ceilings and sequestration and all of these maneuvers that work to make government less

effective and in fact that underscores a broader political goal that most people now I think within

the republican party or at least the the office holders within the republican party support

which is you shouldn't trust government don't like government government is bad and look it

can't do anything and part of the reason it can't do anything is because we're making sure that it

can't do anything and that has been a pretty vicious cycle that the country has been caught up in

for more than a generation now why are republican I don't want to call it moderates but less

conservative figures so weak so imagine another way all this plays out you're on failed vote 11

for Kevin McCarthy and I think the fact that Kevin McCarthy has won the speakership is basically

a disaster now he is so weak he has been proven so weak for he ever takes a gavel the fact that he

is not the guy is just obvious and he is in a lineage of failed speakers now like Paul Ryan slinks

away after just a couple of years John Boehner quits whistling zippity-doodle Eric Cantor who

was supposed to the third member along with McCarthy and Ryan of the young guns who was

considered the likeliest speaker of them all loses in a primary to Dave Brad I mean being

speaker of a republican house is just a disaster of a job at this point and McCarthy is from everything

we can tell looks like he's going to be the weakest of the the crew and the idea that it is this

conservative rump the freedom caucus controlling everything it is repulsive to the 40 or 50

republicans on the other side of the caucus and they could have joined with democrats or others

to elect a republican speaker who is more their kind right you know bring Fred Upton of Michigan

back or something and they don't they don't do anything they just submit and submit and submit

and then whine in the press and submit and then eventually lose elections because a party's gone

so far right that their districts are no longer defendable and I don't get it I don't get why

so many of these people are so weak what it is about the character of the freedom caucus that will

let them stand up and go to war for what they believe in and yet the republican center or you

know for the left even than that has so little interest in trying to rest their chamber back

from the people who've taken it from them and have weakened them I mean I think that at least part of

it is they're pretty outnumbered even if there are 40 or 50 and I agree that moderates isn't the right

term but that we also have a kind of poverty of political language at the moment that people who

just want to get on with things and actually get things done first of all they might not

identify as a cohesive caucus within the republican conference right they might not

feel a kind of unity of purpose that the house freedom caucus does they're certainly not being

backstopped by powerful media voices in the same way that the house freedom caucus would be

and it's probably really difficult to raise a lot of money off of the idea of partnering with the

democrats to pick a speaker and that sort of illustrates one of the boxes that republicans

are in at the moment is that you are going to face many more political problems in teaming up with

the democrats than you are going all the way to the far right of the party and mucking up the

operations of the house just where the media incentives are where the base incentives are

there there isn't a passionate middle for the right or for the republican party and so that

puts it makes it much more difficult to stick your neck out and part of me also agrees with you

was like what are you there for like are you just there to continue to have power indefinitely until

the process that you described happened where you're finally forced out by a primary challenger

from your right or you're there to actually do things and if you're there to actually do things

you should probably get around to doing them and figure out the alliances and coalitions that you

need to build to do the things that you were sent to congress to do there is very little political

courage at the moment among that faction of the republican party and in part they're being

disciplined by what they saw say around the january 6 committee right the the folks who

stood up and said you know what morally i cannot defend the insurrection at the capital morally

i think that we need to do something whether it's serving on that committee or impeaching

donald trump like we have to do something and the people who went with what they thought was the

right thing to do ultimately it cost quite a number of them their jobs and if you don't see

an upside to it and you want to keep holding on to your position because you believe there are

longer term goals that you can continue to work on that could be part of the dynamic but now i'm

just psychoanalyzing people because i also agree that it is it's a little frustrating for people

empowered to just ride the tides and not actually do much of anything i think that's a fair psycho

analysis and certainly the example of list cheney or for that matter separately you know all of your

colleagues who have been primaried over the years is going to be in everybody's head it just seems

to me as a matter of survival to say nothing of thriving that at some point the more mainstream

part of the republican caucus or conference would want to come up with something new i mean another

way of looking at it is looking at baner and ryan who had a lot of power actually i mean ryan

is quite well liked by his colleagues just miserable and baner was a you know fairly

capable speaker not i think a historic man for the job in his time but but knew the institution

you know had support and the thing that i noticed with republicans which is interesting and consistent

now is that they really don't even keep fighting their own base it's not like they typically fight

and lose list cheney was interesting in that she actually ran and lost but before you get to the

like the list cheney level of going toe to toe with the republican party and particularly the

donald trump wing of the republican party you could really fight with a freedom caucus and you

could really be making other kinds of deals you could be doing internal party warfare you know

internal party factional maneuvering and a lot of them just retire rather than trying you know

ryan's like that baner's like that you know and then they'll send me speak their mind three years

later in a tim elbert a profile and political or something and it's just very frustrating i don't

think the it's just not the history of party politics that parties stay the same way forever

but in the way that you did need people like new gingrich to actually pick up on what was possible

and organize against it you do need people to try to create other realities and see if the

the response is there and they just don't they were all just so quiet in the mccarthy situation

i mean they they didn't come up with anything new they could do they just you know mccarthy who

had submitted to everything and the submitting the even more and trading away even more power

they never came up with another play that could sideline these people they hate like i think it's

so important they hate these members of their own their own party and they do nothing about it

that that should motivate them very frustrating yes i mean that that that level of um submissiveness

or inaction is baffling and it actually reminds me of this book that i i've been reading timothy

shanks real liners where he looks at the ways that parties and coalitions change over the course

of american history and he gets to the contemporary era and he looks around and he's like we're

sitting on a knife's edge um where parties are constantly trading power back and forth nobody

can build lasting stable coalitions you don't see things like the landslides of the 1980s or the 1970s

or the 1960s or the 1930s like where have all the landslide elections gone where has all the

one party dominance that has defined most of american history where has that gone why can't

people build these big stable coalitions anymore and that is a question not only for the republican

party but it's actually a question for the democratic party as well and you can point to

institution you can point to structural changes issues around voting and gerrymandering and all

of that but it is also the case that the democratic party does not have massive majorities like we saw

in an earlier era that allowed for a kind of stability of government and for more coalition

building and for more horse trading and and the kinds of things that would make for at least a

functional politics would at least move the country willfully in a particular direction

as a spoiler like he doesn't necessarily have an answer for why that's not happening right now but

it does point to that we are in this moment of real aberration in the longer history of party

politics and this kind of weak needness or this inability to do the kind of coalition building

that has defined so much of american politics that's an ingredient that is missing right now

and the politics that we see playing out not only in the republican party but in the republican

and democratic parties and in election after election is a consequence of that lack of of a

real solid realignment in politics i'm going to check that out i love that recommendation and

i think that's actually a good bridge to our final question which is what are three books you'd

recommend to the audience well i have been reading so many really great history books lately

history books that are doing rich and innovative and deep work but are also incredibly readable

and accessible in a way that sometimes the most innovative work isn't one that i would recommend

is actually really well timed for the fact that we're at the beginning of a new year people are

thinking about hitting the gym again it's a book called fit nation that gains and pains of america's

exercise obsession by natalia petrizella and it's basically like this hundred year look at

exercise in the united states and one of the things that's so smart about what she looks at

is she looks at the way that exercise becomes kind of this luxury good as there's a public

disinvestment from parks and physical education and the kinds of things that would help everyone

have access to fitness and to exercise um so i definitely want to recommend that there is

a book that's not out yet but it's coming out in may and it's brilliant it's called dreamland

america's immigration lottery in an age of restriction by carly goodman and it's about this

thing called the diversity lottery which is a policy that the u.s uses in order to allow

people from underrepresented countries access to the united states they might not have through

skill visas or through family reunification visas and it was originally created actually

in the the 1980s and 1990s because there were so many irish immigrants coming to the united states

without visas or falling out of status so who were here without documentation and powerful figures

like ted kennedy wanted to work to put these people back into status and bring more irish

immigrants over because there were more people who wanted to come than the quota allowed and

what ultimately ends up happening though is that this diversity lottery becomes a key for

people from places like gana to come to the united states and it builds this whole infrastructure

of a kind of lottery for coming to the u.s it's a fascinating story it seems like it's about a

small thing but it's actually this big beautiful sprawling story about immigration in recent years

and then the third one that i want to recommend is jefferson cowie's freedoms dominion a saga

of white resistance to federal power this is a book about white resistance to federal power it's a

big huge long story but he roots it in one tiny place barbara county alabama which is actually

the county that george wallis is from and he looks at how over the course of more than 150 years

white people in barbara county resist all sorts of federal intervention in order to retain the

freedom to oppress whether that's the freedom to impress indigenous people or the freedom to

oppress black people um he looks at how that plays out on the ground in this very small place

all three of these are just gorgeously written books really eye-opening so i wanted to put them

on everyone's radar nicole hammer thank you very much thank you so much

the Ezra Klein shows produced by emma fagabu and yelvin jeff geld, roger karma and christin

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opinion audio is anna with stressor and special thanks to pat mccusker and christina sebelowski

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